Articolul este oferit ca premiu de consolare doamnei Ileana Cornea, pentru articolul "Executat ritualic".


Hussein deserved it

Claudia Rosett
The Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/1/2007

In the short time since Saddam Hussein went to the gallows, we have heard almost every variation on the theme that his death was all wrong. He was killed too soon, in the wrong way, by the wrong people, on the wrong day, following a flawed trial. In the opinion of some, he shouldn't have been executed at all.

What's really wrong here is the transmogrification of Hussein into a sort of Everyman, in whose fate we are all invited to read some portion of our own humanity - and whose execution becomes a prism through which to focus on our private preoccupations with the universe. This is Oprah for tyrants. In a dangerous world, it does us no service.

...
These details become less poignant if you consider that whatever Hussein's kindness to birds, he gassed to death thousands of Kurds. Whatever his affection for weeds, he defused dissent among Iraq's Marsh Arabs by turning their home turf into a wasteland. And however tenderly Hussein read bedtime stories to his children, he trained his two sons to become sadistic killers. And when his two little girls grew up and married a pair of brothers who in the mid-1990s tried to defect, he had those husbands murdered.

...
The big concern of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, as Hussein went to the gallows, was that he be offered every possible chance of amnesty.

We are told that the Palestinians are angry and Iraq's Sunnis are upset. Of course they are (or at least some of them). Hussein was their patron; even in the world's worst totalitarian regimes, there are a few who benefit - at the awful expense of many. What actually needs questioning is why we should pander to those who wish to pose for the cameras around his grave - indifferent in their self-interest to the lives he took, and the agonies he inflicted on millions.

The strange and deadly inversion here is that we are fighting enemies - and Hussein was one of the worst - who count it an honor and a right to murder the innocent. Meanwhile, in our public debate we treat it as shameful to execute the guiltiest of the guilty. If this is the way of our future, better hope we never catch bin Laden.

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